Asuki

Asuki had been sitting on the end of a rooftop bridge above the oldest stair for an hour, a folded newspaper under one arm, legs over the drop, and had counted three things wrong already. A tin step-edge lifting at one corner. A mic cable kinked hard against a basement window frame. A cardboard square in block capitals, bent double on the ninth step so its price read as half a sentence.

The fourth came out of a shelter’s side door on the east alley at nine minutes to eight, yawning, and the door banged shut behind them.

It was a Hyena, and they ran. They took the oldest stair backwards, sack open, snatching squares off each step. A gust lifted a square off the top step. The Hyena lunged.

Asuki was already there. They had come off the bridge, down a drainpipe and up six steps while the square turned over once.

An old-timer on the fourteenth step drew their feet back off the tin and put the lid on their flask.

“That was mine,” said the Hyena. “Course. Heard your lot don’t miss.” A jerk of the head. “Give it here. You’re doing it wrong anyway.”

The right way, it turned out, was to knock twice on each step before lifting anything off it, because a step belongs to whoever’s step it is. Asuki knocked, lifted, flattened the bent square before bagging it, and on the way down eased the cable out of its kink against the window frame. The Hyena watched that last part, then went back up two steps and knocked on the window frame twice.

At eight the Hyena stood at the stair’s foot with the mic on its cable and said, “Eight o’clock.” The time first, always, with Femi Mwangi. Then the sign-off: “Station Zero, awake since Lights Out.”

Three weeks was a long time to be awake, Asuki thought.

They waited until the bulb over the window went dark and the stair had emptied. Then they went down under the stair, where Femi was coiling cable.

“You slept,” Asuki said, low enough that the stair couldn’t hear.

The joke went out of Femi’s voice like a lamp. “Source?”

“Side door, nine minutes to eight. And there’s a shirt on your cheek.”

Femi’s hand went up. The weave of an old shirt was still pressed into the wool there. Femi’s eyes went to the basement window, where a list was pinned for Correction Day, on the eve of first frost, when every station reads out on air what it got wrong.

Femi did not laugh. Femi held out a megaphone.

“Dusk run. Over the bridges to the Map Room steps. They’ll tell you nothing; bring me the nothing.” A pause. “Ten to eight tomorrow, you walk me down the east alley. Anyone asks, you walked me.”

Asuki took the megaphone. Femi went up the stair without knocking on a single step.

The side door was banging in the wind when Asuki reached it. They folded the newspaper twice more into a wedge and pushed it under. Most mornings at ten to eight, that door had told the east alley where Femi came from.

Asuki leaned on it once with a shoulder, felt it hold against the wind, and walked off down the alley with the megaphone.